‘Since when has quantity got to do with quality?’: Greg Hywood defends Fairfax job cuts

Fairfax Media CEO Greg Hywood has tried to shoot down critics who say further cuts at the publisher will mean lower quality publications saying “Since when has quantity got to do with quality?”.

‘Let’s have the quality debate’: Greg Hywood

Hywood, who has come under fire after announcing a further 120 journalism jobs will be cut at The Age and Sydney Morning Herald, penned a piece for Fairfax publications published on Good Friday entitled ‘Let’ have the quality discussion’.

In it he points to the fact the Australian Financial Review had just 25 journalists, a fifth of the number it has today, when he joined in 1975, and just 75 on the SMH, when the paper enjoyed the “rivers of gold” monopoly on classified ad spend.

He wrote: “So let’s put to bed the myth that as Fairfax Media reshapes its publishing model to respond to a very different set of industry economics, and yes, adjusts its staffing levels accordingly, there is some dire threat to quality journalism.

“Fairfax Media has always adjusted to the vagaries of the marketplace but always in the context of delivering our essential promise of independent, fearless reporting.”

But in the article Hywood says the staffing numbers of the papers increased “not because the newspaper needed to lift its quality – it had plenty of that – but to fill the space between the ever increasing number of ads”.

“Some of what was produced to fill those enormous Saturday papers could not qualify under any definition of “quality journalism”. It was the “clickbait” of its time,” he added.

He said the company had been using analytics to determine the articles most in demand from readers from the 9,000 it publishes each month, saying “we are focusing our journalism on the areas of their greatest interest and demand”.

“If we satisfy that interest and deliver it through the appropriate mix of digital and print we have – under the plan we have been implementing for the past five years – a sustainable publishing business,” he wrote.

Hywood then claimed the company has never invested more in investigative reporting from the likes of Adele Ferguson, pointing to stories including the Commonwealth Bank scandals, the Essendon doping saga and the ICAC corruption investigations as being led by Fairfax reporting.

He ends with the line: “Make no mistake – as we reshape our business to meet readers’ demands we will not take a backward step on quality and we will not back away from tackling the tough issues.

“And I am prepared to bet that in another five years we will still be Australia’s leading publisher. Let’s check back in then.”

Alex Hayes

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Alex Hayes is the editor of Mumbrella. He's been a journalist for more than a decade working on newspapers and websites in the UK and Australia, covering the media and marketing sector for the past four years.

Hywood in this instance makes transparent his lack of knowledge of what Fairfax news media publish today and total ignorance of past practices. He is entirely about spin and this example is in the Goebbels category.

Hywood speaks as if he has some authority. He clearly knows nothing about journalism. (And yes, I know he got an award once for writing about General Motors plans, a company he had worked for). Hywood pisses on the good intentions and commitment of very many people who chose to work at Fairfax for its values and culture.
The man is now and ever was only interested in his personal shilling.

The debate around quantity versus quality journalism is a convenient smokescreen. Fairfax have continued to cut staff because Hywood has proven incapable of building the promised new revenue streams. Now they have almost nothing left to sell from his 5 year fire sale other than Domain so they continue cutting.

If analytics are being used to determine the usefulness of staff, how is profitable performance being measured across Hywood’s much publicised growth strategy – events; content marketing; SME (small and medium sized enterprises) digital and marketing services; and data?

Surely we don’t have to wait another 5 years to find that out whilst those at the top remain immune from cuts?

In the words of John Singleton;

“You do get bonza results if you sell your future to protect your past.”

“This Greg Hywood he does not know what he is doing so he just hires consultants to tell him what to do, and obviously he does nothing except what they tell him,”

I’m reliably informed that Hywood made a very odd statement when he showed up as “temporary” CEO. Management does run a company, the board does, he said, adding that Fairfax had a brilliant collection of talent on its board. He was right in one sense: none of those managers lasted very long except for the peculiarly influential Gail Hambly.

The logical conclusion to the Hywood argument is to have just one -good- journalist. But seriously, how can a newspaper run, for example, an investigative team (wishful thinking, the old Spotlight team at the Boston Globe) without a quantity of journalists to cover the full gamut of a major media’s needs? The real challenge of changing market dynamics is to get the balance right, tweaking as you go. I suspect firing 120 in one go doesn’t qualify as astute management.

Greg has ended up with a bad sandwich structural scenario for paid quality journalism. Some key milestones are required before we can say that it’s a growth industry again. These milestones include, the retirement of Rupert Murdoch and his competitive aggression from his newspapers in Australia, the weeding out of free sites as funding fails or the business model of free journalism fails, (e.g. The Guardian group losses draw from the Trust’s cash), and the exploitation of stories across all yield platforms, print, online, and FTA. There are obviously many more, such as the max out of global penetration into Australia where printing plants were the “tariff” barrier, and, at the margin, the free ABC becoming paid. But altogether the simplest Fairfax decisions are to merge with a news and current affairs “heavy” FTA network for talent exploitation, hope the above happens sooner, and utilise the many journalists whether paid full time, part time, or crowd sourced, and mix into a heavily curated model.
It is important that Fairfax maintains platforms for stories, which it appears to be doing. The Fairfax Nabo investment is an example of crowd source localism, which fills a crowd sourced news and social vacancy at the local level that a bunch or suburban journalists cannot possibly cover.
Ultimately the customer drives profitability potential. If you don’t pay, you won’t get what you want from Fairfax. If Fairfax journalism is so bad, start your own.

@roger colman: Queer that you suddenly become a Fairfax fan after years of bagging. Looks like the Hywood spin has won you over?
The point you ignore Roger is that Fairfax must be a quality operation to have any future and Hywood is undoing it. Put simply: Hywood’s claiming clicks (or reach etc) as a measure of success, when it isn’t. the only foundation Fairfax has had or will have is a very strong engagement with a big chunk of the educated, affluent elites. No one can compete with Google and Facebook for traffic and it takes that scale to make any money at all.